How should a wrong (or only 25% right) answer in Q&A be responded to? I see this done two ways: via reply and via a separate answer. The reply doesn't show up in the list of answers, so seems kind of pointless unless someone goes and edits the answer, and a separate answer doesn't visually tie to the error its correcting. If the error is repeated in more than one answer, it feels as if the correction is being out-voted.

First question... The Q&A section isn't really a discussion section. However, on occasion, wrong answers get posted. If you spot a wrong answer you can post a followup to that answer. But as you've mentioned, from the Q/A page, you don't see the followups. My suggestion is, once you've posted your followup, send a /msg to QandAEditors alerting them to the issue, and to your followup. The QandAEditors can rework the errant "answer", incorporating your correction, or remove the wrong answer altogether.

If you don't feel like posting a followup with a correction, you can still alert the QandAEditors via /msg. They'll take care of fixing or removing it.

And definately use your own judgement. If your response is actually "Another way to do it", that might be a "better way", it's possibly not so much a correction as simply another good answer. If that's the case, post it as an answer, not as a followup.

2nd question: You can turn on a setting in your user settings that will cause your inbox to be notified if someone replies to a node you wrote.

3rd question: I can't really comment on why the documentation is outdated (other than the fact that it's probably pretty labor intensive updating it every time a new release comes out). But for those times when you want to link to the POD, and the on-site version is substantially or significantly outdated, you can link to the POD at http://www.perldoc.com.

Dave

"If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber." -- Albert Einstein

No, there is no preview for updates, but you already knew that. We have preview when editors make updates, so such a feature is feasible. I don't expect schedules from volunteers so I won't say anything more about when such might become available. Certainly don't hold your breathe. (:

I think a scheme that might scale better would be to post an improved answer and let Q+A Editors remove duplicates (and do other clean-up if needed).

This allows all to notice the improved answer immediately (even if it takes 2 weeks for a Q+A Editor to do something about it)

This means all can help with improving the content instead of forcing only Q+A Editors to write improved "copy"

This likely reduces the amount of admin work required by editors (Q+A Editors can't delete replies to answers so they'd have to get 3 editors to help them, while they can, acting alone, delete a duplicate answer)

My answer to the last question. I think that people should be encouraged subtly and unsubtly to rely their local documentation (accessible through perldoc). That is the only way to get documentation with any guarantee that its advice should match the version of Perl that you are using. Any version of Perl that they choose to document here will be wrong for a large fraction of users who might try to use it.

I have the feeling that perl documentation is more often updated to correct errors or clarify things than to match new functionality. It follows that newer doc will sometimes be a better choice even when using an older perl.

But I think we would both agree that that pales next to the importance of training users to independently consult their documentation.

If you believed the next version's documentation, here are errors that you would have had from various versions of Perl:

In 5.003 you would have been left thinking that foreach my $var (@list) {...} should work, and would have wondered why it did not.

In 5.004 you would have thought that you could use substr to replace text, not just extract it.

In 5.005 you would have thought that our was a usable keyword and warnings was a usable module.

In 5.6 you would think that you could have the new (and far more stable) threads implementation available.

I have either had or seen people who had questions about every one of these. For instance take a look at RE (3): Should I use $ and $# ? which is from a thread here caused because someone who bought the third edition of the Camel tried to use our in Perl 5.005_03 and then got confused. See RE: Perldoc's vrs. Books, and RTFM's from around the same time period. Since then my opinion about the importance of local documentation has not changed, although I have a better understanding of why people have trouble understanding things sometimes.

Now I haven't done any kind of survey to find out what kind of documentation patch is most prevalent. However my gut tells me that documentation far more often gets added than significantly rewritten. And added documentation is very often documentation added to describe new features which won't be there in old versions.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other